This pastry chef is a believer in whole-grain baking

Brent Wojahn, The OregonianIf the idea of baked goods made with alternative grains makes you think of hockey pucks, then the pastries from Kim Boyce's Golden Oven will be a revelation.

After countless sheets of puff pastry and endless bowls of sabayon, it was a single pancake that changed the way Kim Boyce baked.

That humble pancake, improvised on a griddle at her Los Angeles kitchen table with Bob's Red Mill 10 Grain Pancake Mix and leftover puréed beets and apples, led the longtime pastry chef to months of experimenting with whole-grain flours in her home kitchen. Then came a book contract, and now a baking business in her new home base, Portland.

And good that it did, because now we have "Good to the Grain" (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $29.95, 208 pages), a gorgeous new cookbook that explores the landscape of whole-grain flours, with deliciousness as its guiding principle. Boyce, who trained as a pastry chef at the original Spago and worked closely with Nancy Silverton at Campanile, took a fresh approach to the task of whole-grain baking by not substituting whole-grain flours in traditional pastry recipes. Instead, she created recipes that highlighted their unusual flavors and textures, pairing them with nuts, fruits and other equally hearty ingredients.

These days you'll find her baking versions of those same recipes for Portland coffeehouses, for her new wholesale baking company, Golden Oven. Her husband, Thomas, Spago's former chef de cuisine, provides an assist.

FOODday recently caught up with Boyce to talk about her new venture and the pleasures of whole-grain baking.

A: The biggest reason is flavor; I think whole-grain flours bring a complexity to the pastries that I just don't find with white flour. They also lend a different texture and color to your pastries. The buckwheat flour, when baked, has almost a deep purple quality to it that's really pretty. And I think it just opens out the scope of baking. It's like having new ingredients all over again.

Q: Where's a good place to start?

A: I always refer people to barley flour, because it's a really mild flour, it's very sweet, it's soft and it's an easy one to start substituting for some of the white flour in your recipes. Start with substituting 1/2 cup in a recipe that calls for 2 cups of all-purpose flour, and I think you'll get enough of a result that you'll taste the difference. If you like it, go up to 50 percent. (That level) maintains the texture of the pastry, but you can also taste the flavor. Kamut flour also is one of the more mild flours and it's an easy one to work with. I make a ginger cake recipe that has kamut flour, molasses and holiday spices.

Q: Looking at the recipes -- Figgy Buckwheat Scones, Maple Danish made with rye flour -- it seems like you've devised pastries to fit the flavors of the flour rather than have the flour be part of the background.

A: That was the most exciting thing about this project, really getting to look at all the individual flours and really smell them, taste them, look at the color and figure out what ingredients would really pair nicely with them. It was things like roasted hazelnuts or almonds, fruit, and even down to what sugar I used, whether it was white sugar or brown sugar or honey or molasses. I was not in it to hide any of the flavors. I was in it to bring out the flavors.

Q: Give me an example.

A: Amaranth flour is definitely the most assertive of the flours. It's very grassy, unique and very strong-flavored. My first instinct was to mask it, then I decided to really use that assertiveness and match it with strong flavors that were as assertive as the flour. For me that was dark molasses and chestnut or buckwheat honey.

That's what I want people to take away from these pastries made with whole-grain flours: They're there because they taste good. They don't have to be sold as, "Oh, these are those whole-grain pastries." They're just pastries that happen to taste really good.

Q: You have two young daughters, and you bake snacks for the children at their preschool. What's your approach to baking healthy treats for kids?

A: I'll start with a disclaimer: I think kids get used to whatever they're fed. My kids have grown up eating whole-grain flours; I know it's not as easy for some parents (to get their kids to adapt). So go slow, even if that means only using 1/4 cup of whole-grain flour in a recipe. The other thing to try is reducing the sugar; there's so much in muffins and quick breads.

What I found in doing the book is that cookies really need a ton of butter and a ton of sugar (to taste good). Where you can skimp on sugar is in quick breads, muffins and scones. When I'm baking for the kids, I make a prune purée that's just prunes and boiled water (or you could make it with orange juice and some spices), and I use that in place of sugar. That's really nice, and you could do the same thing with applesauce, apple butter or fig purée.

Q: Do you have a favorite go-to quick bread or muffin recipe for fall?

A: It's the Sweet Potato-Date Muffin recipe right now (see accompanying recipe, above). I'm really liking that. I roast yams for a really long time, until they're really dark and the juices have come out and caramelized on the sheet pan, so the flavor is really intense and the texture isn't watery.

I mix them with eggs, then add whole-wheat and white flour. I use medjool dates, which are fat, juicy, creamy dates. I mix some in the batter and make a cinnamon-spice topping.

Q: Whole-grain flours tend to go rancid quickly. How do you store them?

A: In a glass jar in my refrigerator. I stay away from the freezer because I think it picks up off flavors, which goes against almost everything that you read, but it's really the best way.

You can find Golden Oven pastries at Daily Cafe in the Pearl and Ristretto Roasters.